Content area
Full Text
Market factors prove vexing as inVentiv shop tries to rebound from losses
It's been an up-and-down sort of year for Stonefly Communications Group, a member of inVentiv Health. While the agency is in a good place with some non-prescription accounts, two pieces of Rx business - one landed in 2008 - have evaporated due to market factors like acquisitions and consolidation.
"Outside of agency consolidation, we haven't been hit as much as the larger, traditional agencies," says John Racik, president and CEO.
One instance of tough luck, though, involves GeneraMedix's epoprostenol, a generic injectable treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension which the agency pitched and won in 2008. Stonefly held the account for only nine months before epoprostenol was sold to Actelion.
It's not the first time the agency has lost an account in this fashion. Stonefly had a similar experience in 2007 when then-client Reliant, for whom the agency repped atrial fibrillation drug Rythmol SR, was sold to GlaxoSmithKline.
Mourned more recently by the agency, Stonefly had been working on a patient-education campaign for Novo Nordisk's FlexPen pre-filled insulin syringe - up until this year, that is, when the agency lost it...